


Roommates

by BrieflyDel (newredshoes)



Category: Cabaret - Kander/Ebb, X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Holocaust, alan cumming - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-06-22
Updated: 2003-06-22
Packaged: 2018-01-07 15:37:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1121576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newredshoes/pseuds/BrieflyDel





	Roommates

Kurt had felt the old man's eyes on his neck for many hours after the meeting had disbanded. They made him nervous, like he was trying to extract some vital ore from his person. It was not the stare of someone studying something different: no, Kurt was well used to that by now. Those eyes were mining for a resemblance. Several times he toyed with approaching the fellow, but could never figure out what words to say.

The old man -- Magneto, is that what they called him? -- made the choice for him. _"Junger Mann,"_ he called from the other side of the dying fire. He did not speak in English. "Yes, you -- come over here so I might see you better."

Kurt was startled. "You... you are German?"

Maybe the heat made his smile dance and twist so strangely. "At one point in time, I suppose." His fingers fluttered: Kurt saw him stroke his forearm, near the wrist. "Here, sit here beside me, I won't bite -- not -- too close -- there. Don't look at me, just... sit there." Only the hard lines of his face were illuminated in the ember glow. Kurt swallowed and tried not to flick his tail. As the silence grew longer, he chanced a glance at the strange old man, whose visage was unreadable as stainless steel.

* * *

He had been at the camp three weeks, and he knew he would never get used to it. Once the Nazis had given up on gleaning an explanation for the gate, they'd lost interest and set him loose. Every day he navigated the mud and sheet metal in a daze; every night he pressed himself into the smallest, hardest corner of his lower bunk and huddled numbly in a nest of cheesecloth blankets. His arm still burned and ached, and he would double himself over it to block out the stinging number. Everywhere, someone was weeping; he was still surprised on the occasions he'd realize it was him. No matter how hard he looked, he could find neither his parents nor anyone who might know them. While the enormity of his aloneness hadn't yet hit him, its pain certainly had.

A new train arrived -- from what direction no one could tell, as only one track ended at the camp. He would never have noticed had not a guard unlocked their door after curfew, and with barbed wire shouts ordered the strangers inside. They were not very many -- after peering through the dimness for familiar faces and giving up, he counted. Eight -- his bed was safe; there were fifteen empty mattresses in their barrack, and his was at the very back. He bunched the ends of his blanket in fisted fingers and curled into hibernating position again, waiting for sleep to learn mercy and knock him out.

Something bent the mattress; he slipped a little, and his muscles locked. "Get off!" he snarled weakly, more a whine than anything else. Twisting himself free of his cocoon, he sat up and glared at the intruder. "Find your own..." The man turned a sharp white face to him, and he faltered. He'd never seen anyone so strange-looking in his entire short life. The man reminded him of a stray cat; razor-blade thin and fierce-eyed, like he'd never known a full belly or two hours' sleep strung together.

"This is your bed?" he asked, his voice kept low and cautious. His accent was almost unintelligible.

The boy paused, still gaping. The man's fraying coat hung open, revealing a crosswork of suspenders pressing against an undershirt; a wilted bow-tie was clipped to the middle of his chest. "Where do you come from?" he whispered.

The stranger glanced about the bunker, the light from the perimeter towers illuminating powdery dark eyes. "Recent shipment from [Theresienstadt](http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Witnesses/TheresEng.html), at your service. Herr Hitler thought you folks could use a little entertainment to keep your evenings gay, so here we are." He looked back at the slack-jawed little boy. "Oh, you mean _originally?_ Berlin." He sighed, and leaned against the bunk frame. "Berlin."

He clutched his dilapidated bag to his stomach, kneading the worn leather a little with his fingers. Just when his eyes seemed most far away, they snapped back onto the boy and the bunk overhead. "Are you using that?" Was that a _smirk_ in his voice?

More intrigued than cowed (though still cowed nonetheless), he shook his head. The strange lips stretched into a grin, a welcome sight no matter how forced. "Wonderful!" He tossed his belongings onto the mattress overhead and climbed up the spine of the frame out of sight. He began humming a jaunty, burlesque tune. The boy lay listening to him settle in, trying to reconstruct the man without asking to see him again. Someone yelled at him through the dark to shut up; the boy heard a smug, muttered retort from the top.

Ten minutes might have passed. The dark, clever eyes reappeared over the edge of the bunk. "You there." The boy peered up. "What's your name, Liebling?" The voice was surprisingly gentle. It had been ages since anyone had spoken to him like that.

He _made_ himself wring his voice dry of tears. "Erik."

"Erik, eh? It's been a long time since I knew any Eriks." The pale face vanished again, and the boy heard the man exhale. "Yes, I've a feeling we're going to be perfectly marvelous roommates, Erik."

It seemed many weeks before Erik thought to ask what his name was, and by the time the realization came around, it felt too late to pose the question.

* * *

Even if the Nazis had forgotten the gate, the prisoners had much longer memories, and no one wanted anything to do with the boy. Erik had only one prayer, and that was that no one would tell his new "roommate" about the incident. Tenacious as flypaper, he refused to let the man out of his sight, whether working, eating, or in bed. He didn't bother to ask if he was a nuisance -- too bad if he was. This was a friend, that much was apparent, something too valuable to let slip; for in the camp, the loners were _always_ picked off first.

If he made himself die during the day, he came back alive for the nights. The moment the curfew began and they were herded back into the barracks, he scrubbed the dullness from his eyes and crawled onto the upper bunk and waited for the stories to come. In his former life, the man had been a performer -- "the master of ceremonies," he'd smiled with a bitter wistfulness in the lines around his eyes. Erik soon learned it hardly mattered if he knew the emcee's name or not, because it seemed he had not told it to anyone since he established himself in the cabaret circuit.

These tales were utterly unlike any he knew or could imagine: the emcee spoke of the heady perfume of cigarettes and liquor, of boiling spotlights and lace in scandalous places, the feel of warm wet flesh wherever an indiscriminate hand might grope. He talked about people with names like Fritzie and Frenchie and Lulu and Sally; Cliff, the American writer who got out before it was too late; Bobby and Viktor and Herman and Hans, who didn't. He taught him a stream of terrible jokes and the reasons people laughed at them; he sang dirty songs and scathing songs and songs about everything except love. He smuggled in some charcoal one night and showed Erik how he used to do his stage makeup.

"The trick to surviving, Liebchen," he murmured through the shadow, "is to do everything with flair, and believe none of it. If someone speaks to you, retort with something ten times as clever; if someone kisses you, you must kiss back twenty times better. Never alienate someone that you might need sometime. Never let anyone convince you that you need them."

"Is that what you're doing with me now?" Erik blurted, before he was really sure if he wanted an answer.

The emcee looked at him cannily in the dark. Erik gulped and sat very still. "Ah," he replied, his white teeth flashing a little. "The trick to that question is always to lie."

* * *

Twenty thousand years might have passed, and they would never have known, in the camp. Erik thought it might be spring, for the mud was turning green with algae and the air thickened like soup with flies. Life felt more and more like his cheesecloth clothing, snatched away from him the instant someone with a stronger grip wanted it. The Nazis seemed skittish, and were weeding the prisoners more savagely than usual. Erik added another prayer to his brief repertoire, and that was that neither himself nor the emcee turned the smoke in the towers that much darker.

For the first time, one sullen night, he asked his "roommate" what he planned on doing when they were free. The emcee inhaled deeply, as if commemorating the cigarette that should have been at his lips. "You say that like you're sure we'll live."

Erik didn't reply.

The man, who had gotten no paler and much stranger these months past, continued. "I personally don't plan on dying _here_ ," he remarked flippantly. "No opportunity to go out with a bang. No, I'm setting my stage somewhere else. Cuba, maybe -- that sounds marvelous, doesn't it? Cabana boys and dark Spanish girls wearing nothing but rhinestones. I heard there used to be a place like that in Berlin. I never found it -- not in my district."

"I didn't ask you how you wanted to die," the boy interrupted tensely.

He laughed. "No, of course you didn't." He lay quietly for a few moments. "Listen, this place -- it won't kill me. I spent seventeen years not eating, not sleeping, and working until my bones made their debut at skin-depth. More tattoos -- so what? I've had them done. The only difference is the wardrobe. Even the flats are damp and drafty." His voice shifted from hollow to brittle; the ruse wasn't even working in his own head. The emcee bent his knees a little and laid his face between them. After a dense silence, he spoke again. "I suppose I will go to Berlin again. Or maybe Paris -- it's been ages since I went to France. I will go somewhere where I can go at my own tempo." He turned his head a little and peered at Erik over his knee. "What about you?"

He looked at his hands. "I'm only a little boy." He thought of the gates, whether he should tell his friend what he had opened that day. "I expect they'll tell me where to go."

The emcee seemed to rear, he moved so sleekly. He leaned into Erik's face until their brows nearly touched. "Never let them do that," he whispered tightly. "You never know where they're leading."

* * *

The mutant was obedient, surely through long practice sessions with God, and held the pose without question. Magneto ran his eyes over the silhouetted profile, over and over. As the fire began to sigh itself into surrender, he broke the silence. "Do you know your father, boy?"

The apparition fled, and only Kurt Wagner and his toxic yellow eyes and flicking tail remained. _"Nein, Mein Herr,"_ he answered politely. "I was adopted at a very young age." He wove his six fingers together, his too-honest face betraying the question already. "Sir, if I might ask... do I remind you of someone you know?" His tone carried a note of hope -- laughable, under the circumstances.

He thought on the evacuation, the forced march away from the camp, the desperation to keep his hand in the older man's. The guard who'd forced them apart, and the way his gun had twisted and metal helmet constricted. He stood up. The teleporter did as well. "Sir?" he repeated eagerly.

Magneto studied his companion's garish studded jacket, his striped circus pants -- _a performer,_ he noted. _An acrobat, or so I heard. And that attack on the White House had no small amount of flair in its execution._

He only smiled, confident it was unseen, and flicked his cape over one forearm. He slipped away behind the curtain of trees with a private _"Auf Wiedersehen"_ and the full intention of interrogating Mystique at his own leisure.


End file.
